1. Field Of The Invention
The invention herein pertains to hardware for sliding doors and particularly for large doors as are used with entertainment centers.
2. Description Of The Prior Art And Objectives Of The Invention
In recent years entertainment centers have become popular furniture items for homes, motels, hotels and offices. Entertainment centers are generally large cabinets made of wood or similar materials which will house stereos, cd players, television sets, VCR""s and other entertainment equipment. It is important that the entertainment center be closable when not in use yet when opened the doors need to not only fold but retract into the cabinet due to their large size. As a result, folding and sliding door hardware has been used for many years. However, many cabinets have front moldings which extend to reduce the frontal opening. This has required the hardware installers to use wooden blocks or other materials to offset the fixed tracks to accommodate the door to thereby allow it to bypass or clear the front molding. Other installers have used blocks of wood mounted to the track arm to provide sufficient space between the rails and door hinge to allow the door to clear the molding as the door is extended from the cabinet. These wooden blocks or supports are often unsatisfactory since they may split or be of non-uniform dimensions, causing installation, operation and maintenance problems with the sliding doors.
In addition, as entertainment centers are generally finished with either paint or varnish, the inside edges of the doors proximate the cabinet sides are difficult to finish once the cabinet has been assembled and placed in a home or office. While the door edges can be finished by removing the doors, this is of great inconvenience as oftentimes the cabinet finishers are not skilled at adjusting the doors whereby the users are left with cabinet doors which do not properly function.
In order to overcome these and other problems associated with conventional sliding door cabinet hardware, the present invention was conceived and one of its objectives is to provide cabinet door hardware which is both easy to install and which provides a superior functioning cabinet door.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a sliding door hardware assembly and method which can be easily used by inexperienced installers in minimum time.
It is still another objective of the present invention to provide sliding door hardware including a slotted plate which allows a cabinet finisher to quickly, temporarily adjust the door so that all edges are exposed external of the cabinet, without the necessity of totally removing the doors from the cabinet, and then, easily readjusting the door to its normal operational position.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide metal u-shaped spacers and slotted plates which can be uniformly produced and easily adapted to conventional sliding door hardware which will replace wooden fill strips.
Various other objectives and advantages will become apparent to those skilled in the art as a more detailed description is set forth below.
The aforesaid and other objectives are realized by providing a preferred cabinet sliding door hardware assembly consisting of conventional sidewall mounted tracks having a track arm extending therebetween. Attached to the track arms at each end thereof is a u-shaped spacer. Affixed to the spacer in an adjustable fashion is a planar slotted plate. Attached to the plate is a conventional sliding door hinge to allow the door to pivot along a vertical axis. The slotted plate allows a threaded member to be tightened therein in one of a plurality of apertures defined by the u-shaped spacer while the slotted plate allows the door to extend totally beyond the front of the cabinet for painting or the like, and then to be returned to its normal operational position.
The preferred method of using the hardware assembly consists of attaching parallel tracks to an interior cabinet wall such as the interior cabinet wall of an entertainment center. A track arm is positioned or slidably mounted within the pair of parallel tracks and affixed thereto is a u-shaped spacer at each end which is sized to allow the door to clear the front cabinet molding. A planar slotted plate is then affixed by screws to each u-shaped spacer in a selected position which can be varied according to the particular aperture in the u-shaped member chosen. Thereafter a typical hinge for the sliding door is attached to each slotted plate with the door. The sliding door can then be moved along the tracks as needed. Temporary adjustments can be made to the position of the planar slotted member relative to the u-shaped spacer, for example such as when finishing the interior edges of the doors.